NASA picks Elon Musk’s SpaceX for climate change SWOT mission

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As billionaire Elon Musk and his team explore the likelihood of humans stepping on the surface of Mars soon, his company, SpaceX, or the Space Exploration Technologies, has been selected by NASA, the space agency of the United States, to provide launch services for its SWOT mission.

The launch cost is approximately $112 million.

SWOT, or, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, is designed to make the first-ever survey of our planet’s surface water.

On its website, the American space agency said the mission will collect detailed measurements of how water bodies on our home planet change over time. The mission’s satellite will survey about 90 percent of Earth, exploring its lakes, reservoirs, rivers, and oceans, at least twice every twenty one days. It could help scientists provide better freshwater management in many countries around the world, as well as improvements in models of ocean circulation, and better climate and weather predictions.

The mission will be developed by NASA with the space agency of France, the CNES–or, the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales.

SpaceX will provide the Falcon 9 rocket with launch target in April 2021 from Vandenberg Air Force Base’s Space Launch Complex 4E in California.

Also, NASA said its Launch Services Program in Florida will manage the said SpaceX launch project, as the project’s office located in Pasadena, California, at NASA JPL, will look after the development of the spacecraft for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

By all means the SWOT mission is part of NASA’s Earth-focused projects lineup that might get cuts under the Trump administration.

Unlike the outgoing President, Barack Obama, Mr. Trump isn’t convinced that climate change is real, as he believes that it was perpetrated by China to shoot the American economy. However, recent tweets published by New York Times reporters suggest that the President-elect is keeping an ‘open mind’ on climate change, saying that there is some connection between human activity and the warming of the planet.

Albeit in a separate report, a former United States Congressman said that under President Trump, NASA would focus more on space explorations while putting Earth Science projects out of the picture.

Bob Walker, who has advised the incoming President, has told a British publication that the Trump presidency will focus on moving NASA’s agenda to non-Earth missions, like visiting the moon again, and even Mars.